The present invention relates to an access system for a local area network (LAN) and, more particularly, to a multi-channel multiple access communication system.
In a LAN, the transfer of video data, audio signals and other continuous data have customarily been implemented with a central control type channel switching system. The central control type channel switching system is such that a central control device scans nodes of the network by polling to check channel assignment and connection requests. A decisive factor in the channel assignment which relies on such a central control is the reliability of the central control device; once it fails, the whole system fails. Further, because one central control device is required with no regard to the number of nodes which belong to the network, the system construction becomes disproportionately complicated when the number of nodes is relatively small. In addition, the communication efficiency, especially communication time, is limited by that of the central control device so that the system efficiency is sharply lowered as the number of nodes is increased.